Here is a real oddity: a French version of a play by that most Anglo-Saxon of authors, Alan Ayckbourn - directed by the 85-year-old nouvelle vague master Alain Resnais. Ayckbourn's 2004 ensemble piece (renamed Coeurs for the French market) is transplanted to Paris, though on the walls of one apartment, you can see an incongruous Scarborough poster, in sly tribute to the British dramatist. Resnais has a weakness for stage adaptation and this is not the first time he has worked with an Alan Ayckbourn text: the 1982 play Intimate Exchanges became Resnais's award-winning film Smoking/No Smoking.

This is a carefully arranged, painstakingly furnished movie with well-intentioned performances from, among others, André Dussollier, Lambert Wilson, Laura Morante and Sabine Azéma. They play a clutch of lonely souls in the big city with secret lusts and hidden yearnings, doomed forever to be thwarted.

But what a stagey, creaky, clunky thing this is: never at any point does the story take wing or take life. Its theatrical origins are heavily present at all times, not least in the supercilious snowfall tableau that punctuates each and every scene-change. Azéma plays a pious Christian woman with a raunchy secret, and yet this mysterious lusty self, and her attitude towards it, are unexplored - and unconvincing in the first place. Neither comic, nor tragic, nor tragicomic, the movie manages to be entirely inconsequential, gesturing at emotional truths which it is quite unable to embody.